Diversity is a grand experiment. We’re the lab rats.

Summary: One of the biggest phenomena of our time is the Left’s social engineering of entire societies. Communism was their first big success, and their first big failure. With undiminished enthusiasm, they persuaded to us to implement new theories. Such as open borders. But questions about the project are not allowed. Here is one man on the fringes who dared to ask questions. The Left’s reaction tells us much.

Often the largest trends in the world are the most difficult to see. For our time that is the Left’s love of massive social engineering. Remaking the world, without testing, guided only by their theories. The horrific results in Europe and Asia of communism (a failure everywhere) taught them nothing. Now the West has unthinkingly volunteered as lab rats to test equally or even more radical changes in gender roles (affecting marriage and families) and open borders.

As with communism, these programs are implemented with bold confident claims – lacking any real-world foundation – about the benefits. Plus, powerful attacks on any who challenge them, or even as inconvenient questions. Only those on the fringes dare to speak out. For example, on September 7, Fox’s Tucker Carlson asked some important questions in his evening rant.

“They’ve talked a lot about norms, called a lot of people racist, and tried to make anyone who disagrees with them shut up. And, of course, they’ve lectured us endlessly about something called diversity as if that answers some relevant question.” {Played video clips.}

Obama: “Our diversity, our patchwork heritage, is not a weakness. It is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths.”

Bernie Sanders: “Our diversity is one of our greatest strengths.”

Hillary Clinton: “We know our diversity is a strength, not a weakness.”

“They all agree on that. It’s hard to know exactly what it means though other than stop talking or else. …{W}e deserve to have some simple questions answered, and we mean answered for real, not just with a sneer and a ticket to the H.R. department for sensitivity training. So here it goes.

“First, how is our current immigration system made America more stable and more prosperous? In your answer, please explain what happened to the State of California? Used to be called the Golden State. Had a thriving middle class. Had the country’s best schools. Now the schools in California are a complete disaster. The middle class is vanishing, and the nation’s largest mass of impoverished people remains behind to serve a tiny pool of tech oligarchs. How exactly did that happen?

“Next, how precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors, your coworkers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question. …

“How about this question? After spending two centuries overcoming our country’s painful history of racial discrimination and hatred, why is it once again acceptable, even encouraged, to attack people on the basis of their skin color? …”.

The reaction is the key message

They Left’s replies were their standard tactics: schoolyard insults and screams of “racism”. These are tactics that exploit their institutional power on this issue: dominance in the news media and support of the 1%. The latter is the key. Open borders serve the interests of the 1% in many ways, which is why they have supported it since the end of the frontier in the late 19th century (against strong public opposition). It depresses wages (more supply of labor) and fragments the citizenry (divide and rule worked for Rome, and works just as well today).

When they pretend to reply to his challenge, they combine evasion and misdirection. As in this CNN “fact-checking.” They pretend not to see how the rich avoid the chaos of our increasingly diverse cities, and pretend that employers’ interests are ours – and that rising immigration is unrelated to the coincident stagnation of real incomes for the middle and lower classes.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Conclusions

The cold reality is that there is little history of good results from kind of massive immigration of people — mostly poor, with little education — from very different cultures into slow-growing societies.

This worked for us in ever different circumstances in the late 19C. We had the economic booms from the “frontier” (undeveloped land stolen from Native Americans) and the last industrial revolution (if we get another, it is likely to generate wealth but destroy jobs). Equally important, America used vigorous methods to force assimilation — the opposite of today’s public policy.

Big experiments conducted with suppression of questions — or even thought — are not likely to end well for us. Historians will diagnose our problem as an epidemic of recklessness and folly. The people responsible: us. Our passivity and apathy are not excuses.

2. My people came here legally in 1810. They worked hard and melted in. They learned the language and culture , they added to society, and we are better for it. They didn’t take from anyone because there was no welfare. Modern immigrants are much different.

“You raise an important point that is totally ignored by advocates for open borders: massive immigration is in practice incompatible with a generous welfare state.”

Milton Friedman made this very point several decades ago, and he is being proved right.

On the basic account, isn’t the UK (and perhaps other European countries, like Sweden) a counter-example? The right is generally the party of immigration restriction, the left favors open borders. In the UK, this difference has just been confirmed yet again by the Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott.

This has held for a generation or two, despite the fact that during this period Labour has been the party of the unions, almost entirely funded by them. Yet the unions as entitites and their members as individuals are the most under threat from increased labor supply. And yet Labour has held to an approach favoring basically unrestricted or very lax immigration policies despite strong voices in the party pointing out that this is a vote loser for them.

There was a classic instance of this during the last election but one, when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was campaigning. He was attacked on the point by a middle aged woman working class voter. His subsequent comments were captured on an open mike, as he referred to her contemptuously as a ‘racist woman’.

There is an even greater anomaly: in the UK the immigrant population, first or second generation, votes predominantly Labour, but the general view you frequently find expressed by them is hostility to open borders and to more immigration.

I don’t think the evidence supports the view that its as simple as the 1% promoting a narrative that favors their interests. Its more complicated, and there are strong elements of denial among its advocates. On the face of it they seem to be favoring policies which are known to damage both their constituency and their electoral prospects.

RE: “massive immigration is in practice incompatible with a generous welfare state.”

“On the basic account, isn’t the UK (and perhaps other European countries, like Sweden) a counter-example?”

No, it’s not. Your examples are not even relevant to this point.

That the Left supports open borders AND open borders does not mean that the two positions are economically compatible. It just means that they have incompatible or nonsensical policy positions. The Left in Britain nationalized and then ran into the ground many of its major industries. After 3 decades of socialism, in 1976 Britain required a massive bailout from the IMF to avoid catastrophe. In the next election, Labor was overthrown and Margaret Thatcher took power.

This resulted not from the Left wanting disaster, but from incompatible goals – economic prosperity and socialism. So it is today.

The rest of your comment is even less relevant.

“I don’t think the evidence supports the view that its as simple as the 1% promoting a narrative that favors their interests.”

Of course you don’t. Keep those eyes closed, or who knows what you’ll see.

Larry, your account of British social history post WWII is alarmingly and wildly oversimplified. This may well be how it looked from California, but real life was inconveniently much more complicated.

The basic point remains. I don’t understand, and I don’t think you do either, why the UK Labour Party, which is left wing, funded by organized labour, and whose voters are substantially working class, favors more immigration, which is, as you point out, not in its voters interests at all.

Even harder to understand, they have favored it despite it being a well known thing in the party that this is electoral poison.

You can say that its just incompetence and stupidity, and it is, but that is to characterize it, not explain it. The question is why their incompetence and stupidity took this particular form. There is plenty of both about in UK politics, but why did they pick this particular position and thing to be stupid about?

It is also striking that in the UK, opposition to immigration is a right wing, a Conservative position. The
recent Conservative governments haven’t delivered on their promises, but they have promised to restrict it to very low levels. Yet, if the theory that immigration is in the interests of, and promoted by, the 1%, these people too are acting against their interests. Why are they doing that?

I suppose you could say they promised to get elected, with no intention of delivering, but I think this is pretty hard to show. They certainly have conducted immigration policy in ways that suggest they were serious, and that they did not fail to meet their targets through lack of will but through the fact that its very difficult to do.

I don’t know the answer to these issues. What I am sure of is that I haven’t seen any account of motivation on either right or left in Europe that makes sense out of what we see – the left favoring immigration which hurts their constituents and damages their electoral prospects, and the right favoring restrictions which are contrary to the interests of their constituency.

Forced diversity is fueling real racism. Likewise racism towards the Caucasians are denied by the statement: “One cannot be racist against white people” which I see on twitter and elsewhere from people purportedly from the left.

That’s the worse news. The adoption of explicit racism by leftist minorities has made racism legitimate again, undoing a century of hard-won social progress.

** In rebuttal to the inevitable mindless rebuttal: “progress” does not mean America has become a Heaven-like utopia for minorities. It just means that the best we can do is have our society improved by progress, generation after generation.

That nails it. Judging by merit and character provides no benefit to factional leaders. It neither recruits to their factions nor arouses factional hate. It promotes neither dissention nor hatred. What good is it?

The Left may well rant and rail over the following as far too simplistic.

Reflecting back on the underpinnings, the vigor and vitality of our Nation’s … America’s past … adherence to “The Rule of Law” has served us remarkably well. Yet, the Left would have us devolve into ethical, moral, political, and social “situationally diverse” and lawless chaos from which only their clique of self anointed, globalist oligarchs could ever possibly survive.

Oh … we are all too aware of Judge made Law, Administrative Rules & Regulations, Findings, Presidential Administrative Orders, and a host of other strategies and tactics that distract from the law and undermine and subvert in order to serve special interests. However, through the “warp and woof” of it all, our Great Nation has always seemed to accommodate and embrace the head banging and arm twisting that goes on. We’ve miraculously survived innumerable raucous and rowdy dust ups. All, if too far beyond the pale, are eventually reigned in and tempered by Constitutional constraints and The Rule of Law.

For this Ole’ Buzzard, the simple, little video “American Form of Government” here https://goo.gl/u0cugh serves well to make the foregoing points clearer. What all of the above does NOT take into account is the unique nature of the crisis we face today in an age when so many can be influenced by so few for such little effort. Fabius Maximus is clearly a place to go for enlightenment.

The Left has increasingly come to see the world in terms of race and gender, an oddly similar perspective to that of the Nazis. This is a second great betrayal in post-WWII American history. The Republicans abandoned their party’s principles in the 1960s by embracing racism (details here). Now the Left has betrayed its history. For centuries the West has struggled to transcend the divisions that have led to endless war and strife, and see each other as just people. The decades since WWII saw great progress. Now the Left has not just abandoned the project, but gone to the other side — embracing exclusionary values and a racial (and gender) hierarchy.

The significance of these betrayals is difficult to see, and might be too large to see. Now both Left and Right in America see the world in terms of race. In this, as in so many things, both Left and Right are working against America.

Consider the consequences

This play describes Sir Thomas More’s (1478 – 1535) last few years of his life, and his clash with Henry VIII. The King had ordered More to take an Oath of Supremacy declaring Henry to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. Alice More is More’s wife. William Roper was an attorney, member of Parliament, and More’s son-in-law.

This passage describes a different kind of law than the principles of equality, but the conclusion might apply to us. It often sounds wise to abandon large values for small victory over one’s foes. The result can be painful.

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you are just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

“The Left has increasingly come to see the world in terms of race and gender, an oddly similar perspective to that of the Nazis.”

Yes, this is deeply true, clearly said, and needs saying. Its become so much the culture now that it takes a real effort to even see it. Often what happens is that policies which depend on it are assumed to be automatically justified, and if you point out what is implied by them, What the underlying assumption actuall is, and suggest that its not a very savory assumption, you will be met with a non-plussed silence falling back to the assertion that to question it is itself racist.

Larry, This may be a bit oblique to the discussion herein, but the Devil has made me link y’all to a chart by Martin Armstrong. The introduction to his chart is as follows, “According to analysis by RENTCafé of the 30 largest cities in the U.S., millennials (those born between 1977 and 1996) are flocking – proportionally speaking – to downtown LA. Between 2011 and 2016 there was a 91.4 percent increase in people of that generation living in the 90014 ZIP code. Neighboring Skid Row/90013 saw the second largest jump, with 60.0 percent.”

Larry … No conclusions … just inferences. Mark me down as a “Traditionalist” who admits a definite deficit in logic when it comes to cutting the Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials too much slack. Although serving in the military after The Greatest Generation, I served with them. Their blood and sacrifice made our Nation more secure for a time. My sense is that the Boomers, Xers, and Millennials who have led and who still presume to lead us have lost their and our way. Hence, my wry but perhaps illogical delight at hearing/seeing their numbers increase in L.A. Downtown and its Skid Row.

On the bright side, perhaps the Millenials have moved into blighted areas for the intent and purpose of improving their communities. I found an interesting “Generational Differences Chart” here http://www.wmfc.org/uploads/GenerationalDifferencesChart.pdf Scattered throughout the chart are characteristics that have served this Nation well.

“On the bright side, perhaps the Millenials have moved into blighted areas for the intent and purpose of improving their communities.”

Rather, high real estate prices make renovating low-price areas economically attractive. After all, the current inhabitants can be pushed out easily (they don’t own the land or buildings).

Re: differences between generations

Color me skeptical about actual differences, as opposed to people reacting to the radical changes in our society over periods of 10 to 20 years (ie, gens behave differently because they live in new worlds). For example, see “Rethinking ‘Generation Me’: A Study of Cohort Effects from 1976-2006” by Kali H. Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donnellan in Perspectives on Generational Science.

“Social commentators have argued that changes over the last decades have coalesced to create a relatively unique generation of young people. However, using large samples of U.S. high-school seniors from 1976 to 2006 (Total N = 477,380), we found little evidence of meaningful change in egotism, self-enhancement, individualism, self-esteem, locus of control, hopelessness, happiness, life satisfaction, loneliness, antisocial behavior, time spent working or watching television, political activity, the importance of religion, and the importance of social status over the last 30 years. Today’s youth are less fearful of social problems than previous generations and they are also more cynical and less trusting. In addition, today’s youth have higher educational expectations than previous generations. However, an inspection of effect sizes provided little evidence for strong or widespread cohort-linked changes.”